The MiniPC Revolution
jadarma.github.io
jadarma.github.io
I got soooo tired setting up a gaming system for parties on my projector. There are so many various problems and tweaks, gamepads disconnecting if you put a hand between the gamepad and the pc/playstation etc. BSODs on windows, driver problems and stupid obscure things varying from pc to pc. I want plug and play, but consoles have their own problems and limitations. I am too old to debug this stuff to play a game for so little time, I would rather not. I didn't really believe in steam machines at the time, but now I sort of do, especially with game streaming and local LLMs that might be hosted there now.
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Valve-Fremont-Upcoming-console...
I'm glad they are. There's probably a sizeable market for a console that runs PC games smoothly at 1080. And could double as a PC. If they get it to the size of an XBox Series S or smaller, I would probably get one.
I hope they'll fix their rumored team wars inside the company.
I already have a Steam Deck that I can't let my kids touch, which is stupid. I can't hook something like this up in a shared space of any kind without improved parental controls, including ability to toggle visibility of game library entries, and (ideally, but not strictly necessary) the ability to say "do not show this user's entire library to anyone else on this machine, or on the network, nobody with a different login"
I wonder if a stopgap solution would be something like Bazzite on the Deck. Then you could have true multiuser while retaining the Deck's ease of use. But I could see other problems.
I'm sure you've probably already tried this or something similar. I just couldn't resist thinking out loud. It's an interesting problem.
Valve launched Steam Machines with their own OS and started shipping a version of Steam on Linux with predictable library versions. At the same time, they started working with the Wine project and shipping things which is now called Proton but is actually the cumulative results of their own patches.
This paved the way for the success of the Steam Deck when adequate material became available.
I don’t think it makes sense to call the Steam Machine a misstep because there was no Proton. There would be no Proton nor Steam Deck without the ground work started with the Steam Machines.
I’ve written before about how I think the Steam Deck is one of the best v1 products in recent memory, in large part because Valve learned so much (and so well) from the failures of the Steam Machines.
I don’t know if I would call it a misstep, but it was absolutely a failure. And a brutal one. Valve should be lauded for taking the right lessons from that failure and investing in Proton and doing the compatibility work themselves rather than expecting devs to do it (Apple is the only company that consistently gets developers to rebuild for their platform, and even game developers won’t do that), but we shouldn’t let the fact that it wound up on the right path years later diminish the fact that the original strategy —- if not the devices or idea itself —- was hugely flawed.
Personally, for such an early and unlikely product, I don’t view it as a failure at all. They ironed everything they had to using the platform as a stepping stone.
They can also introduce Windows/DirectX APIs that Proton will have a hard time copying, by requiring additional hardware or subsystem features not easily copyable.
They can let their legal team have some fun.
Finally, companies don't last forever, and I am betting as the 2nd most valuable company in the planet, Microsoft will outlive Steam's current management and eventually deal with the problem in another way.
They can try making Proton's job more difficult, but I'd expect that major changes to the APIs would prevent a lot of existing games from working on Windows.
Legally, I don't think they've got a leg to stand on.
Steamdeck is already a niche device, and they have direct competition since years now. Optimizing the software and interface won't probably make it much worse for Valve.
> They can also introduce Windows/DirectX APIs that Proton will have a hard time copying, by requiring additional hardware or subsystem features not easily copyable.
Seems unrealistic that games will adapt a new restricted API, which at the same will be a longterm hazzle for Wine/Proton, and will survive that court-battles. At best, it's just some annoying money-sink, with Microsoft playing on time to make it worse for everyone without gaining any real advantage.
> Finally, companies don't last forever, and I am betting as the 2nd most valuable company in the planet, Microsoft will outlive Steam's current management and eventually deal with the problem in another way.
That's actually realistic, but there is also the chance that valve will be outliving Windows and has to battle with whatever will follow.
How so? A console is literally a gaming PC.
I can see the point of “need multiple consoles because game X isn’t on console Y” or “I’d like to play an RTS/MMO that isn’t on a console” but since you mentioned gamepads that point mostly dies.
I also haven’t ever had a PS5 or Switch controller lose link from a console because someone walks or stands between myself and the console.
One big part's the library. I can still play Steam games I bought when the Gamecube was current. My Gamecube games do not work on the Switch. My Dreamcast games certainly don't! The library for the PC is enormous and generally you don't have to re-buy old games to keep playing them, even after major hardware upgrades. Hell I got like a few hundred games on Itch.io years ago for so little money they may as well have been free, and sure they're mostly short "jank" games and art games and stuff, but that's still games and I like them! You can't get that kind of thing (with that kind of "OMG I may never even get through all these..." magnitude, I don't mean jank or art games, both exist on consoles, even if they're not well represented) on a console.
To do anything similar with consoles, you need, like... a dozen consoles, or more, with keeping that number down requiring putting a lot of money and time into careful curation and selection. A single PC does the trick, though.
Another's longevity & archiving (not unrelated to the library thing, but not exactly the same thing). The PC is my platform of last resort for console game archiving. Consoles don't really fill this role at all. Even a "hacked" console (if it's hackable) is on borrowed time. The hardware dies, and eventually the only ones left are in museums or crazy-expensive private collections. Meanwhile I play freeware PC games I downloaded in the 1990s, sometimes, like the exact same binary (to the degree it's "the same", which it isn't, but I just mean I didn't have to go download it again) that's been shuffled from one disk to another ever since. They're not gone. And thanks to PCs, neither are old console games (this is a state of affairs that's on life support, for newer consoles, but not quite dead yet)
Another's the controls. I don't really want a console at my desk (and there's gonna be a PC regardless, so that's nothing extra) because I definitely want one on my TV, and I don't want two of the same console. I don't really want to use a mouse & keyboard on my couch, I've done it, the best solutions I've found take up a bunch of space, look bad, and are still a worse experience than a desk. Some games that I love, I have no interest in playing them if it's not with a mouse and keyboard (and for plenty of others, a controller is better! I like tons of games that are best played with a controller, but for some, it's mouse & keyboard or I'll simply not play them).
Another factor's modding. I've gotten hundreds of extra hours out of games I've bought, thanks to mods. 50+% of my time in the Half Life and Source engines has been in total conversion mods. I'd probably only have put about a quarter as many hours into Morrowind or Skyrim as I have, without mods. I never touched the base game of Rome: Total War again after I discovered the Europa Barbarorum mod, which I sunk probably a hundred or more hours into. All for free, and you don't get that on consoles, the closest you get are things like level designers, sometimes, in LittleBigPlanet or what have you... and those all die when the game servers die.
FWIW I have... a lot of consoles, I don't hate them or anything, and these days most (90%?) of my gaming is on consoles. But they're not a gaming PC.
(Really, if gaming PCs were more-stable, less-janky, and didn't have such a hard time consistently pairing with and juggling multiple BlueTooth controllers [even the SteamDeck fails to live up to "real" consoles, on any of those fronts] I'd probably not bother with consoles at all, but that's such a crippling issue for PC hardware that instead I have a bunch of consoles, and have even re-bought games 3 or 4 times just for the convenience of being able to play them on one of the small set of real consoles currently connected to my TV)
Consoles are walled gardens, while PC is an open park. On a proper PC, you can choose anything from everything, while consoles are very restricted in terms of software and ability. I mean, think about modding, running other software besides the game (browser, (voice-)chat, etc.), having special hardware like a mouse, keyboard, capture-card, a second screen... Consoles are again slowly those things, but it's still not the same as a proper Gaming-PC.
The zimaboard runs pfsense & an nginx reverse proxy, then all six of the mini-pcs run proxmox. 4 mini-pcs run k8s clusters (talos) and the other two run home services and selected one-offs (home-assistant, plex, bookstack, build-tools, gitea, origin servers for a subset of projects).
It was a lot easier to set up than I had expected. Its was still a massive PITA though. I got what I wanted out of it work-wise, and its a nice little novelty.
I've been thinking about ditching most of it for a while; I like the idea in the article about breaking it up - move one under the TV, one into the office, one under the stairs, and the remaining 3 + zimaboard I'm tempted to sell. I'd keep running proxmox on them, but I wouldn't link them up. The key thing that needs to happen for this to make sense is using something like cloudflare to route domains.
The part I never sorted properly was storage. It has 3TB of storage, but getting that storage into k8s for proper dynamic allocation without giving random nodes CPU perf issues was a too-long-for-one-session task which meant it never got finished. I was tempted to add a NAS, but most NAS's are horrid.
A man can turn the means into the purpose.
Now I often have the 4 k8s hosts off. But use them maybe once a month.
Ceph ebds are pretty easy and can offer good resilience but definitely have some performance issues in a standard homelab.
Something dumb like smb/nfs actually can work quite well if your workload doesn't mind it.
Rclone volumes work quite well for some cases not served by obvious other solutions but you have general FUSE limitations.
This made me laugh. I’ve currently got a home assistant controlled floor standing light in my bathroom because all the old school switch ones in ceiling are dead and landlord is being well a classic landlord
I've mostly lived in 100+ year old homes with old janky wiring and have never had a light fixture die, just bulbs.
With power off(easy case)?
With power on(difficult)?
ANSWER:
If the power is off, they likely will remove the glass bulb (one piece), examine the situation and then unscrew the metal bulb base (second piece) and finally, remove any stray material in the (unpowered) socket.
If the power is on, the correct answer is "No, they likely cannot unscrew the bulb. Instead they will likely short the circuit, blow a breaker/fuse and put themselves in a situation where they must call in someone more knowledgeable, (or worse)."
If someone doesn't know what the electricity zaps and couldn't think two steps ahead then they definitely should be anywhere near a power circuits, operating a car or be allowed to vote.
EDIT: of course it should had been 'shouldn't be anywhere' but it's even better, so I leave it as is.
If so, this may be the first time an important political question has been resolved without a light bulb turning on (figurative or otherwise).
Not what I would support it made that way...
OP here - no just dealing with UK ring circuits where the lights are wired inline with non-light devices. And since I'm renting I'm not here to do handyman work. Lightbulbs I do ofc replace myself.
* https://gov.uk/government/publications/electrical-safety-app...
That said, bringing in a mains-powered non-IP-rated portable floor standing lamp because the ceiling mounted one is broken is definitely not the intended outcome of such safety standards.
Don't forget to earth all your water pipes to ground, and only use sockets that are water-rated to resist biblical floods.
I remember being intrigued by a big 40 x 40 cm plastic box on the outside wall of the cabin we were staying at in the UK. Opening the movable front-flap revealed 1 (one) 220V power socket, protected on all sides with enough rubber and plastic to seal a submarine hatch. I had absolutely no doubt it fully complied with all the norms of health and safety..
BS 7671 (IEE Wiring Regs) does not require bonding of the pipework if the mains (service) pipes and the internal (installation) piping are both plastic.
I would like to have a light in my stairs. It's hard to see at night in the winter. My solutions is going to be to spin up home assistant, a zigbee base, and some fairy lights on a 'smart' switch.
I could learn the skills to troubleshoot why the electrical connection is (apparently) bad to the lamp, but given that said connection is in the walls, my DIY skills are trash, and I'm scared of electricity, I'm gonna do the project that's more fun and lines up with some stuff I wanted to do anyway.
I have no idea why the lamp doesn't work, especially because the fixture at the base of the stairs does, but the landlord insists it worked before we moved in.
- the two-way switched lights may have never worked as intended. So no matter what you do with the endpoints it may never work.
- doing it yourself is a waste of time and money. You'll learn nothing of value and will toss it all in the end.
-Proper solution is to hire a certified electrician who is familiar with two-way lights to fix/replace the current wiring.
If you rent, pay the electrician and send the bill to the landlord. Keep a copy. If landlord hasn't paid by the time you move out, bill him for the price. If he stiffs you, sue him in small claims court - he'll pay or you'll win.
Cheapest fix: run an extension cord with a bulb to the upstairs light, turn it on and leave it on all the time. Electricity is cheap, bulbs efficient. Having a light on inside keeps burglars away, esp. bathroom lights (according to Malcolm X).
Or just get a motion activated one.
They have their own shenanigans, but...
But with it up the top of a set of stairs and in the air requiring a ladder or something to stand on I wouldn't recommend it for a first time because if you did get shocked, not knowing what is coming (and possibly even if you did), you would jerk or jump away and possibly fall down the stairs which is way worse.
I'm in the UK that has more reliance on ring circuits i.e. electrically its a chain of devices. So depending on details one fault can take out all the lights in a room
>Your landlord isn't changing your bulbs?
They're just taking their time.
Normally I'd just replace bulbs myself but this is a bit more complicated cause its hooked into other devices as well and i can't even tell what is broken
But bringing a mains powered non-IP-rated portable substitute into the room in the interim is a truly terrible idea. The regs also specify that there's a minimum distance that stuff should have from baths, sinks, showers, cisterns, and whatnot; and that they should not be reachable at all by a wet human being.
I'll wave this at you:
* https://electricalsafetyfirst.org.uk/guidance/safety-around-...
And you in turn wave this at your landlord:
* https://electricalsafetyfirst.org.uk/guidance/advice-for-you...
Better yet, pay someone to do it (and maybe show you the hows and the hazards). Then you could be living like a true American.
And without risking the "standing lamp" falling into your bathtub!
a $20 lamp you get to keep is smarter and safer than fixing someone else's property doing unlicensed electrical work at your own cost and without their permission... why does this even have to be explained?
Are you from the US? The overwhelming likely fixes to "my bathroom light won't work" are not work that would require skilled electrical work or a permit. The cost is also not likely to be more than a floor lamp, and the tenant can also keep the fixture when they leave.
Also many jurisdictions (willing to bet covering a huge plurality of Americans) would let you subtract the cost of necessary repairs from your rent.
When house shopping, I have found non-GFCI outlets where code said they should be GFCI. A homeowner got a crappy electrician, and you think all landlords will get the best electricians that follow code?
I still haven’t been able to find something that fits the bill - the hardest part to get information on is noise, since most people don’t seem to care about it or just play with headphones. I understand that such a product is hard to build, with a direct tension between power, space and noise.
What has never been clear to me is whether such a market even exists and I’d tend to say no, even if the market seems to be changing rapidly with amd apus ( we’re far from a 5080 , but it seems to be a step in the right direction ).
My last small form factor gaming PC was an Origin Chronos. It was great but it was definitely not quiet. The larger Origins offer liquid cooling but I'm guessing it can't be done in that small form factor.
The Ryzen Max+ 395 is in the ballpark of a RTX 4060 (but I believe it's starts to massively fall behind when ray tracing is enabled). It's an iGPU so I would imagine noise is greatly reduced (though probably not silent) compared to machines with dGPUs. However, that's going to cost roughly $2000 so it won't be cheap and will be vastly outperformed by a $2000 desktop pc.
There's a bunch of demos on YouTube of people upscaling from as low as 360p and while not pretty, it's definitely serviceable. It might be worth the wait if you're budget constraint or patient!
My best solution by far turned out to be long cables going through the wall to a pc in the next room over.
When I was younger, I had a KVM in my bedroom going through the wall to two computers under the sink in my bathroom. lol. But it worked. silence.
Second best recently was a zotac magnus. More for compact though than noise. Bought a noctua replacement fan. works well with headphones.
I do have a silent/fanless zotac server. It works well, but it does fileserving, not cpu-intensive anything.
Radxa CM5 + Waveshare CM4 Nano
Packs a punch at very low power...
You probably need a tiny Nuctua fan on it if you're going to play HL2 on it.
It's ARM so it will take a while for titles to be ported, but studios better realize this is the platform of the future.
Currently game engines are clueless.
The kickstand means it takes up very little space in a cabinet. It does have a fan, but it's great for what it is.
Otherwise you're stuck with lower performing gpus, as normal ram at least in its current state won't be able to approach the bandwidth necessary to keep up with a full fat high end gpu. And nobody is making mini pcs that work like laptops with normal dgpus so you're stuck with igpus with the normal solutions
But that was around $700 a couple of years back on sale, and these days you are looking at $1000+ (with 20-50% increments if you need a better GPU or multiple NVMe slots), plus the new Ryzen AI chipsets command an additional premium.
I’d give it 2-3 years for things to settle down and discrete GPUs to be come a thing of the past.
- Specs are too limited for my needs (storage capacity for backup / home NAS purposes; compute power for local AI work; throughput for local high speed network traffic shaping; etc)
- can't upgrade over time (right now I'm averaging 15 years for my boxes, with incremental upgrades like storage, RAID adapters, memory, CPU etc, and I don't need to go through the days-long hassle of reformatting, reinstalling and reconfiguring OS's, services and software).
- less supported over time (I can still download driver upgrades in some cases, and find solutions if I run into something unexpected as the vendor is still in business and supporting the legacy model).
Full sized machines aren't difficult to build, and I've had great luck with second hand enterprise-targeted parts (eg. for a long time years back, used Mellanox Infiniband cards were dirt cheap on eBay because universities were upgrading to later generations, they were an order of magnitude faster than NIC's available at competing price points at the time, and as a bonus had lower latency). Older Areca RAID cards were great for SATA drives, easily upgradeable to new models, and I still have a few kicking around in production today.
Meanwhile neighbors have thrown out piles of ewaste and wasted time after their commodity junk failed unexpectedly.
You can also run a single storage box and then just pop over network (10gbe, thunderbolt, etc). One big box of spinning rust and tons of cheap compute.
Most folks are running proxmox and your OS installs are automated. Use ansible. I like docker swarm on top of a fleet of cattle vms on proxmox.
I feel like I rarely upgraded anything except GPU and storage. And GPU's are not needed for a server.
Enclosure means easy storage upgrade and I can always reattach the enclosure to another machine quickly. Might even install OS on the enclosure, then the whole setup will survive compute upgrades until the predominant architecture changes.
Unfortunately a lot of the mini-PCs skimp on USB ports. AMD's FL1 form-factor mobile "socket" has 4x 10Gbps + 1x 40Gbps USB-C ports on the SoC, but many of the designs often only have ~2x usb3 class ports and rarely the USB4 port at all. I'd really appreciate these mini-PC's exposing more of the chip's usb! Definitely something to shop for.
With USB4, there's also the added benefit of having host-to-host interfaces: it's short range but 40Gbps host-to-host is real nice to have (in practice it's often half or less this speed alas).
Upgradability is over-rated, when costs are low. A Minisforum 795S7 can be had for $400, and has dual ("only" PCIe 4.0) SSD slots and a 16-core 7945HX Zen4. It's mobile-on-desktop (MoDT): I can't ever replace the CPU, but I suspect this crazy cheap system is going to have a long long life before I feel the need to upgrade it. Replacing it whole when the time comes seems not a concern. RAM and SSD are separate and can be moved out if desired.
Having a couple of pre-built nas' from QNAP or Synology can go a long way to getting one's feet wet to learn what they offer that we sometimes learn the hard way about.
Seems entirely reasonable so far, everything works well. It’s much quieter and lower power than the HP micro server gen8 it’s replacing.
The web was run on beefy SPARC and NeXT workstations until Google came along and sharded it out onto cheap off-the-shelf hardware. Then containerization/virtualization started replicating individual machines as VMs to try to give you root-access control on timeshared hardware. Now computing is cheap, and the OP is advocating for "just make each container its own device."
Have seen hundred of chinese ones fail. More than half failed between 1 and 3 years.
As stated by others, issues are mainly and very commonly with the power stage / power management of the mainboard. Also, soldering quality issues leading to failures.
Far less issues with good brands like Dell and HP (had a few hundred of desktop mini g2/3/4). Even tinys from Lenovo do perform quite well compared to their entry level laptops (also quite bad). Industrial computers form factor are also generally quite good but quite expensive, even second hand ones.
Currently don't have enough feddback on the Asus ones nor enough volume to draw conclusions, but so far they performed well with minimal issue, even with models back from i3/i5 8th gen series.
This is especially frustrating because I have an ancient dell optiplex and dell precision with i3-2100 and i3-5xx that still work. I occasionally need to open the box to reseat the ram for whatever reason after a power failure but by an large these machines are over ten years old!
Different kind of support concern from yours, but also noteworthy. Really unfortunate.
I still have an old HP EliteDesk (i5-8600t) that is my one reliable 24/7 system, still runs fine. Also no bios updates, so I guess there's that. Mini-PCs to me started more as a way to buy cast-off business gear, these small affordable small business systems, even cheaper second hand. It's amazing and great seeing this new market rise up to make interesting mini-pc's, and the value is often still pretty good, but it's a very different character from where the trend started.
If it’s an EliteDesk G2 Mini, the last BIOS update was released in May 2024.
I thought it would be moot, because I vaguely remember HP starting to require support contracts for bios updates. But I guess that only applies to HP Enterprise gear? Yuck, what a pox.
Even without wanting to attribute that to any malicious planned obsolescence, my impression is that the very small size of mini PCs makes it almost impossible for the manufacturer to ensure proper thermal management for keeping all components constantly at a temperature low enough for device longevity.
I've had great luck with Mac minis over the years. I've had many of them. I'll probably go that route in the future if needed.
I know there are better quality x86 options out there, but the prices go up fast, and I find them hard to justify for what I'd be doing with it. The Mac is really price competitive, which makes it even harder to justify those other options.
The whole idea was that I wanted it to be a simple flick of the switch, or turn of a knob, to play some music. The “smart” stuff and apps have more friction than I’d like when I just want some background noise. The random lockups and reboot issues created a different kind of friction.
A few old G4 Mac minis just came back into my possession. Maybe I’ll just use one of those. My main issue there is memories of old iTunes getting caught in a loop when shuffling. Do it do long and it starts to essentially play the same playlist it generated on repeat. But maybe for this I won’t care, that’s how most radio stations seem to operate anyway, and I’d have the power to force it to mix things up.
Not sure what went wrong with the beelink; the os shouldn't have locked by by itself, too.
That's the mistake. Secondhand Dell, HP, or Lenovo mini PCs would probably have served better. They're cheap when second hand and the ones I've had have lasted a decade because the big OEMs are experienced in building office PCs.
So much for being reputable.
We must be looking into different kinds of MiniPCs, because I don't consider 300 euros cheap, and those models are a joke in specs.
To have something usable it is more like reaching the 500 euros.
Also I don't want replaceable, I want repairable.
Last year I had to throw one away that barely worked, and I am not getting one ever again.
So either buy one of these new very fancy minipc (ms-01 etc) or DIY. End up landing on 2nd hand AM4 hardware but with 2nd hand enterprise SSDs and optanes. And that's been perfect. Competent at virtualization (5700X) and the hybrid enterprise ssd/optane array will take endless punishment.
That said not abandoning the minipcs & SBCs. 3 raspberries for HA k8s controlplane, low power minipc to keep home assistant and adguard live 24/7 etc.
I initially was recommended a "Minisforum" thing, which I did buy, but it absolutely hated Debian for reasons I don't understand. It would boot, but not reboot, so you'd have to power cycle it every time. Not practical.
The Asus also came with its own issues - it only supports one stick of RAM unless you do a BIOS update, so you have to be careful not to put both sticks in until after the update. Slightly crazy.
Modern ones with Intel N95 CPUs are actually fairly impressive for the price. The N95 is roughly the equivalent of a Sandy Bridge era i5 which is plenty of power for what I'm using them for. They've also were under $150 IIRC.
My N95 systems have SODIMM slots for RAM and m.2 slots for storage. They're also got two Ethernet ports I set as a bonded interface so they get ~2Gbps to each other (and my NAS) on the same switch.
My unofficial tips:
- Get miniPCs with barrel adapters for power rather than USB. A lot of cheap ones like the old Bay Trail sort used microUSB for power and that's just terrible (sorry Raspberry Pis)
- You'd be surprised at how powerful an N95 or AMD equivalent APU actually is these days. Outside of compiling, 3D rendering, or AI inference such machines are rarely CPU-bound.
- Get black tape to put over stupid lights and front LCD screens that can't be controlled in Linux.
- Avoid Windows on such machines and just go with Linux. Ubuntu and Mint fly on them out of the box, lighter DEs fly even faster. As servers they can host an impressive number of services that aren't compute-bound. Hardware video encoding means even stuff like Jellyfin is really light.
Price can vary significantly from under $200 for an Intel N150-based system all the way up to Ryzen AI Max+ 395 systems costing $2000.
A lot of the mini PC makers have gotten pretty legitimate recent years, and some makers like Minisform can even charge a bit of a premium based on their brand name. More "traditional" hardware makers like Asus and ASRock also sell Mini PCs. And of course Apple is also a significant player in the Mini PC world with the Mac Mini. So definitely not just an Ali express thing - although Mini PCs can certainly be purchased there as well.
These refurbished 1L "tiny" desktops from big vendors like Lenovo, HP, and Dell are also popular with the Mini PC server crowd. https://a.co/d/g1mgUnl
It looks nice, though. I'm impressed they were able to get 11W idle power consumption with a 400W power supply (most mini pcs have much smaller power supplies, which are supposed to be more efficient with smaller loads). [1]
[1] https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/i-clustered-four-fram...
If anyone has a good orchestration system for minipcs sitting on a network in terms of patching etc would love a pointer.
Have you looked at Proxmox? It will give you centralised management at least.
Maybe puppet? https://help.puppet.com/core/current/Content/PuppetCore/pupp...
The thing is that once lights are computer programmed, you can program them. For example I had made a program to stop playing music after I leave home because I hated to put the music off and then walk out, but I also didn't want the music to play all day while I was out.
If one wasn't likely to have a rack of desktop PCs at home, one probably will be hard pressed to have a reason for a collection of mini PCs.
On the other hand, there are a few more use cases than just over-egging a light switch or being a big file server. One can replaced dedicated hardware such as network gateways/routers, and do self-hosting, for examples.
There are RaspberryPi systems that one can get with extra Ethernet ports that can be set up to do application gatewaying and routing with general-purpose operating systems like FreeBSD, NetBSD, and such. And obviously filtering HTTP/other proxies incorporating spam/advertising/malware blockers are a well-known use case.
There are oddball mini PCs in some parts of the world with loads of serial ports, useful as terminal hosts if one has a lot of systems with no disploy/HIDs. (I saw one mentioned on the FediVerse the other day. It turned out that it was an old Russian point-of-sale system, with 6 serial ports.) More of a use case for someone who already has lots of PCs (with serial ports), of course.
But yes, it's not going to be everyone's cup of tea. Not everyone is Kitboga with a server farm in xyr garage running speech synthesis engines and language models to call scammers. (-:
On the gripping hand, I swapped out someone's under-the-desk tower for a mini PC years ago simply for space reasons.
I set up one to run Frigate [1] to detect motion over my several security cameras and send me notification emails with still images and video clips attached. It works well, and I hate the idea of sending my private videos to the cloud for processing with usual security camera setups.
I've been trying to optimize my desktop's power consumption. At the beginning of the year I put the kill-a-watt on it and was shocked to see it was using 115W idle! I got it to 90W pretty quickly with some minor Linux tuning but was still pretty unhappy to see so much idle load. Recently though, I've got it idling at 57W, which makes me feel much better about it (although more than I'd want for a 24/7 load). 5700X cpu and RDNA4 9070XT video card.
Dialing down unnecessary cooling helped more than I would have guessed. Under-volting the GPU -30mV may have helped but I'm not sure. Adjusting every governor I could find to powersave helps of course, and doesn't feel noticeably different. A lot I think is just that the new tuned daemon is way way way better at it's job than previous solutions like tlp was. I did have some problems with my Crucial P3+ NVMe drive not liking "powersupersave" PCIe Active State Power Management (aspm), but most improvements were a kernel setting away, and tuned really seemed to do .
One of the thing I really love about modern computing is that I can just dial in power consumption under load. With the new RDNA4 video card, I was seeing 450W power consumption when gaming. But I can open CoreCtrl and tell it, no, use 70W, and for surprisingly little FPS hit my system is now down to ~155W. (Still looking for more control in Linux for the CPU!)
It is lovely that there are all these mini-PC's, many of which will idle at ~10W! But definitely worth noting that power consumption on desktop is much more configurable than it used to be.
Yeah you can't change the processor or motherboard out, but generally those sit in "new computer" territory anyways.
Replaceable CPU is harder to find. However, there is the Minisforum MS-A1 which has an AMD AM5 motherboard with replaceable CPU.
Yes, some have soldered down parts but a lot don't. For ~$500 you can get a decent CPU, 32GB of RAM, 1TB SSD and something like a Radeon 780M, which is no desktop GPU but it's surprisingly useful. Some even have Oculink connectors for external GPUs although I'm not sure how many people end up using this.
You will find wildly varying networking connectivity like Wifi 6 vs 7, 1 or 2 Ethernet connectors that can be anything from 1GbE to 10GbE and a wide variety of different USB connectors and speeds.
At $500 I really just don't care if it lasts forever.
You can go more expensive and get a beefier CPU and/or GPU or go cheaper by going cheaper on both.
I'm personally so over assembling PCs. I just want something that works.
Currently I drag my laptop with me back and forth from the office. It's small and light, so not a huge issue. I also use Resilio Sync to sync my data between a few different laptops I use, plus github, and the amount of work which is just in the browser now, I have almost nothing that isn't accessible from anywhere.
The only reason I'd need a laptop at the office is for when I go into a zoom meeting and need a device in one of our breakout rooms.
Sure, I could just use my phone for that, but not quite the right experience.
Anyone have suggestions for this?
PCs take a lot of resources to make. We shouldn't encourage throw away culture any more than is necessary.
Just my opinion, though.
Are mini-PCs actually more likely to have a shorter lifespan? Does the smaller physical footprint contribute to a smaller ecological footprint than a full-sized machine? Does the smaller energy consumption offset the manufacture footprint in a meaningful way?
Personally, I found that I've been more likely to donate older mini-PCs to local nonprofits who repurpose them than I am full-sized machines, which I tend to keep around for "just in case" parts scavenging that in practice I rarely actually do. Meanwhile, having a lower cost mini-PC available has made me more likely to start out with a low power machine for a dedicated task with them promise I can always replace it with a "real" machine if the need ends up requiring it. To date, though, the mini-PC has always ended up proving to be "enough" and I've never actually needed to replace one for performance reasons.
But this is just anecdotal. Like I said, I'm curious if there's any real data pointing one way or another.
I ended up going with a more expensive mini-PC style vendor, but I was surprised there didn't seem to be a ton of competitors.
The HDDs are installed in a case externally. An external PCIe slot to support those 4 mixed drives via an adapter would work too. I tend to avoid usb HDDs enclosures, since usb connection doesn’t work well with ZFS.
That would be a cool ZFS NAS.
I also need a lot of RAM for proxmox VMs and containers. The CPU in my experience need not have many cores. I mean truenas itself virtualized demands 8GB of RAM.
Would suggest you do the same I did - climb onto ebay and look at the AM4 systems that gamers are dumping. AM4 is aging out of gaming space but for NAS/proxmox duty they're aging like fine wine. Look for one that has is X570 and has bifuraction support on the X16
Zimaboards come close. Two sata ports and 1-2 NVMe via PCIe. I heard the board may not be able to power all these drives. RAM is limited to 8-16 GB.
I guess I should separate HDD storage in a proper NAS and use a miniPC for VMs and containers only.
Apparently you can upgrade the Ugreen 2-bay DXP2800 to 32GB.
AOOSTAR 2-bay AMD R7 5825U mini PC seems to check the boxes, for an entry-level storage + virtualization miniPC host. The CPU is similar to AMD R7 5800H in a Beelink SER5 Pro miniPC which runs proxmox very well.
It has a cpu with 8C/16T, up to 4.5GHz, and supports max 2x32gb DDR4 3200Mhz RAM, 2x4T PCIe 3.0 M.2 NVMes and 2x2.5G NICs.
If you need multiple devices, as mentioned in the article, you can even stack the laptops and build a small tower of "MiniPCs" all with different purposes.
Another advantage is that they already come with a built-in screen and keyboard allowing for quick debugging, without needing to connect external peripherals.
I'd love to have a 40Gbps backlink for a Ceph cluster.
That link has pretty much all the info I was after. Pity it doesn't reach anywhere close to the theoretical speeds though, but hey at least it's better than 10GbE. :)
I'm not sure how much I agree with "just buy another host", definitely use cases for that but having one machine running everything works very well
Another option is getting a dedicated power supply. Mean Well makes a HEP-600-20, with 560W of 20V power. You can power quite a cluster off that! It sucks that they don't take 24v: there's so many 24v power supplies, but 19/20V is quite rare!
I have quite handful of hard drives in toaster-style carriers: having a single high efficiency rugged 12V power supply felt better than dealing with a sea of questionable-efficiecy power bricks.
Where can I find that? My current Intel NUC has two M.2 slots and a SATA connection. If I were to relax the definition of a MiniPC to include mini ITX then yes I can find these, but given how the author talks about being all-in-one, I doubt the author is talking about mini ITX builds.
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/mini-nases-marry-nvme...
You can also get larger ones like the Asus Flashstor that can do 12.
Or make it a 5x1 parity for a smidge of redundancy.
Currently in Pre-order, but $210 for 6 slots and an N150
One thing to note in this recent trend is that these designs mostly use the Alder Lake-N / "Twin Lake" cores, which are quad low-power E-cores (still adequate). But more critically, there's only 9 lanes PCIe 3.0! And some of those lanes need to go to networking, be it ethernet and/or wifi! Often there'll be 1x PCIe lane per SSD. Given that it's a NAS running maybe dual 2.5Gbit, this isn't catastrophically bad (1x can do 8Gb/s), but conceptually I find it a bit dismaying anyhow. https://www.techpowerup.com/cpu-specs/processor-n150.c4109
> You can expect average power draws of 20-50W in usage and 6-12W in idle.
> Put that in perspective with high-end machines with hardware concerned with performance and not power draw, that can easily idle at 100W.
Have you measured that? I think my full ATX desktop only idles around 30 watts. (With a bunch of apps running ofc) I took out the GPU to reach that, something was wrong with the power saving, feels like bad drivers.
That said... I'm not totally disagreeing. I have a mini PC running a couple web and P2P services. I'm trying to unburden my ATX so it can shut down at night to save power and do maintenance. And having more computers would shift me away from my "kitten" habits, so I'd abstract over hardware better.
https://www.bee-link.com/products/beelink-eq14-n150?_pos=4&_...
They're cheap enough that I don't mind dedicating one (or two) for specific tasks.
Like a big boy Steam Deck with no display or controller.
Preferably in the same price range, definitely under 1000€.
I bought my forever box on impulse, it was only $130 for a whole mini PC! (with my own ram+storage) I thought surely it'll join the group of devices collecting dust... I was very wrong.
Turns out this PC is meant to be the most utilized of all my computers. It basically has been up 24/7 for 7 years and I really have no excuse to upgrade it yet.
While its processor is nothing to look at (even an N100 is a meaningful step up), on paper it roughly matches a Phenom II X4 955 BE CPU, which was my Windows 7 gaming CPU for many years! so it holds a special place in my heart. It was also my entry to the world of self-hosting docker containers which empowered me to replace the paid/enshitified services I depended on before.
But the problem is.. custom non-replaceable parts. I realistically don't see a way I'm going to be able to fix the problem so I have to live with the noise. So basically another disposable consumer appliance. But it wasn't cheap.
This is frankly the problem I see with these little things. They're just too custom and the brands not mainstream, with no retail supply chain into Europe or North America to support the product.
6-10w idle (similar to rasp pi) but 4-10x more perf.
Above that they need a fan.
(Not saying they're not a good value, but you'd have to cherry pick a few benchmarks to say there's 4-10x performance.)
At the wall? I measured mine and it was higher with gpu disabled.
Real world benchmarks/usage is going to be dominated by sd card speed vs m2 perf. That’s why upgrading system is so much slower on pi vs n100…